Alaska has the most land of any state but only three Electoral
College votes, and President Bush got 61 percent of the vote there four years ago. So when
Barack Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe suggested last week that the Democrat might make
a campaign trip there, eyebrows were raised.
Newsweek's Andrew Romano wondered if every reporter covering Plouffe's
press briefing at Democratic National Committee headquarters
responded to this Alaska talk by "scribbling 'crazy' in his
notebook. And underlining it. Twice."
Crazy or not, Plouffe's half-baked Alaska idea is apparently
sincere.
"That is the plan -- we are pretty sure he's going to come at
the end of the summer," Obama's newly named Alaska campaign
director, Kat Pustay, told the Anchorage Daily News. "The campaign
in Chicago is saying this is a battleground state so we're going to
get resources."
The last presidential candidate to make a campaign trip to
Alaska was Richard Nixon in 1960. Nixon carried Alaska, but he
narrowly lost the election to John F. Kennedy.
Most observers concluded that the Republican's time-consuming
journey to Fairbanks on the Sunday before Election Day --
fulfilling an earlier pledge to campaign in all 50 states -- was a
blunder.
HOWEVER MISBEGOTTEN Obama's Alaska expedition might be, at least
the people there are eligible to vote for him. That's more than can
be said for the folks the Democrat will encounter on the overseas
trip the Obama campaign announced over the weekend.
The July trip to England, France, Germany, Jordan and Israel
"will be an important opportunity for me to assess the situation in
countries that are critical to American national security, and to
consult with some of our closest friends and allies about the
common challenges we face," Obama said in the press release
announcing his travel plans.
The trip likely also will be "an important opportunity" for
Republicans to score points at Obama's expense. The same GOP wits
who dubbed the most recent Democratic presidential candidate
John Francois Kerry are sure to have a
fun-filled field day with Obama's world tour.
More practically, every day Obama spends hobnobbing with the
elite in Paris and Bonn is a day not spent campaigning in the
handful of swing states where this year's election is likely to be
decided -- a roster that, contrary to the giddy hopes at Obama HQ,
won't include Alaska.
Obama's European excursion, like Plouffe's remarks last week
about sending the candidate to Alaska, Wyoming, and perhaps Texas,
is apparently an expression of the sublime optimism that seems to
have seized the minds of the Democrat's top campaign
operatives.
With few exceptions, the Beltway press was knocked out by
Plouffe's Power Point presentation Wednesday (here's the video
version) in which he boldly declared that John McCain has "very
little" chance to capture any of the 19 states and 251 electoral
votes won by Kerry four years ago, while Obama has lots of chances
to win the states that Bush won in 2004.
"The point is we've got a lot of states where we're playing
offense. John McCain has limited opportunity to win back Kerry
states," Plouffe said as he reprised his presentation for
Obama's supporters, praising their candidate's "unique strength in
states like Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada," as well as among
independents, youth and black voters.
Liberals like Eleanor Clift ate this stuff up with a spoon.
Plouffe executed his electoral-map slideshow with "surgical
precision," Clift wrote at Newsweek. "Plouffe is
convincing, and here's why: He ran a brilliant primary
campaign."
HOWEVER "BRILLIANT" it may have been, the way Obama won the
nomination is actually cause to doubt his strength in the general
election.
As Hillary Clinton's supporters repeatedly pointed out, Obama
earned his delegate margin in caucus states -- which emphasize the
grassroots organizing that is his campaign's specialty -- and among
black voters in Southern states that will almost certainly end up
in the Republican column on Nov. 4.
Moreover, Obama didn't win any of the big "swing" states of the
past two elections -- notably Florida and Ohio -- and he didn't
even contest traditionally Democratic states like Kentucky and West
Virginia won by Bush in 2004.
Plouffe's optimistic presentation had an air of plausibility
because it came on the heels of two recent polls, by Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, showing Obama with
double-digit leads.
Those polls, however, were anomalous outliers published during a
week when the Gallup daily tracking poll consistently showed the race tied, or nearly so.
And Democrats nearly always do better in summer polls than they do
on Election Day. As Paul West of the Chicago Tribune
noted, as late as July 1988, Mike Dukakis had a
17-point lead over George H.W. Bush.
Even as Plouffe made his confident predictions and Obama
announced his foreign itinerary, signs of potential problems for
the Democrat kept cropping up. Despite Friday's pageant of
togetherness in Unity, New Hampshire, resentment still simmers
between the Obama and Clinton camps, with Bill Clinton reportedly
declaring that Obama will have to "kiss my ass" if he wants the ex-president's
support.
AS EVIDENCE THAT Team Obama has taken its eye off the ball,
consider the "Unite for Change" house parties that campaign volunteers hosted
Saturday, intended to highlight the "unity" theme of Friday's
Obama-Clinton show in New Hampshire.
A Democrat who hosted a "Pie and Coffee Social" in central
Pennsylvania told me that there was "very short notice …
like three days," from the national campaign about the events.
The woman who'd led the local Clinton effort during the
primaries was out of town on vacation, the Pennsylvanian said, and
with so little time to send out invitations, he'd gotten only four
RSVPs by Friday evening.
Meanwhile in Missouri, it was reported that the McCain campaign was airing
three times as many ads as Obama, buttressing the Republican's
7-point lead in that state.
The liberal Talking Points Memo blog noted "readers from a number of other swing states
reported seeing the same thing -- a flood of McCain ads and only a
much smaller number of Obama ads." This is rather surprising, given
the Democrat's supposedly insuperable financial edge.
Other evidence contradicting the rosy scenario painted by
Plouffe includes one poll last month showing Obama ahead by a
slender three points in deep-blue Connecticut, whose ex-Democratic
Sen. Joe Lieberman is now actively campaigning for McCain.
While the Democrat does have bright prospects in several
previously Republican states, it's hard to see how Obama's handlers
expect to capitalize on those chances by sending their candidate
abroad to "burnish his foreign policy credentials."
During his Power Point presentation, Plouffe pointed with pride
to the "enthusiasm gap" Obama enjoys over his Republican
rival. As anemic as the McCain campaign may seem, the decision to
send the Democratic nominee for a summer sojourn overseas indicates
excessive enthusiasm at Obama HQ.
With just 125 days remaining until Nov. 4, if Obama wants to see
the sights in London and Paris, expect Republicans to fondly bid
him bon voyage.
topics:
Foreign Policy, John McCain, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Israel, Alaska
